‘Purgatorio’: From Darkness to Light
A review of ‘Purgatorio’, by Dante Alighieri; 1320.
‘Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down — that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.’
That snippet, taken from the Book of Revelation, describes the fall of the archangel Satan. Dante built on it. In the mythology of his Commedia, Satan put a dent in the earth when he crashed into it, creating Hell and, on the other side of the planet, the seven-storey mountain of Mount Purgatory. We begin the second canticle of Dante’s masterpiece on the shores of this place, at six o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday. Our hero, Dante’s pilgrim, has just ascended from Hell with Virgil, his guide, to see the stars.
The mountain has three main sections: the Ante-Purgatory, where late repentants await admission; the seven terraces of Purgatory proper, representing the seven deadly sins; and the Earthly Paradise at the summit. The souls that Dante and Virgil encounter suffer here not as punishment but purgation. At the start, Dante meets King Manfred, who died in rebellion against the Church but seeks forgiveness, and so a theme is established: redemption, even for the gravest sinner, is possible, so long as that sinner repents sincerely.
We begin the second canticle at six o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday.
Dante and Virgin start up the mountain. An angel carves seven Ps (for peccata, meaning ‘sins’) into Dante’s forehead. These, standing for pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust, are erased one by one as he ascends each terrace. As in Inferno, the principle of contrapasso applies: the prideful, on the first terrace, are crushed by heavy stones, and si forced to bow their heads in humility; the envious, on the second, wear rough cloaks and have their eyes sewn shut with iron wire. The difference between the suffering here and in Hell is that on Mount Purgatory pain is corrective, not retributive.
Dante learns moral and spiritual lessons as he climbs. Pride, that is, excessive self-love, is the root of many sins; it is also the one with which he identifies most strongly. But it is not the ultimate basis of sin. Dante mounts the case that love is the source of vice as well as virtue. It is ‘the seed in you of every virtue / and of every deed that merits punishment.’ We either love the wrong things, he says, or love good things too much, or love too little. All sins can be linked to excessive, deficient or perverted love. The most perfect love, its highest form, is love of God, which brings all other forms of love into balance.
So runs Dante’s argument. And deliverance from sin rests on free will. In Inferno, the souls are trapped forever by their misdeeds. In Purgatorio, they choose to repent. The souls bear their suffering willingly, knowing that it leads to salvation. And their progress up the mountain reflects a journey from enslavement in vice to freedom in virtue. Free will, for Dante, is the capacity to align oneself with God’s will. Divine grace is still necessary; but we must make an effort to be good.
In Inferno, the souls are trapped forever by their misdeeds. In Purgatorio, they choose to repent.
Dante’s verse is lyrical, reflective, hopeful. It stands in contrast to the harsher poetry of Inferno. The pace is slower: it mirrors the lengthy work of moral and spiritual growth, rendered poetically as souls climbing Mount Purgatory. Light, water and air replace darkness, fire, blood and muck:
‘About the coming of dawn, the eastern sky
Rosed, and the rest of heaven all clearly fair,
While the sun’s disc behind the misty air
Was tempered of its glory …’
Towards the end of Purgatorio, Dante reunites with the poet Statius. They talk about faith and poetry, pointing to the importance of art in inculcating judgement and virtue. Like Roger Scruton, Dante sees art as having a moral purpose: it is a means to call on the viewer, reader or listener to rise to the height her dignity demands. The connection could be said to be stronger. For a good poet composes in a spontaneous, intuitive way, to the extent that there is no delay, as it were, between her impulse and production. The ego drops away and mind, body and world coalesce. This coalescence is what mature religion aims at. ‘The eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees me,’ said Meister Eckhart, pointing to the collapse of the subject-object distinction which is the essence of mystical experience. Dante, in and through his sublime verse, expresses his faith and love of the divine. That verse, and the devotion behind it, will reache its apogee in Paradiso.
